carseatfandomcom-20200214-history
Puzzling - What is it and how does it work?
One quick and easy way to determine whether a particular combination of car seats will fit in the back seat of your car is to add up the widths of the various seats, measure the interior width of your vehicle, and see whether the seats are wider than the vehicle. That should do it, right? Well... believe it or not, there are some situations in which you can fit more inches of child restraint in your car than you have width in your vehicle's back seat. You don't even have to drive a Tardis to make it work. The secret is what we call "Puzzling." That term refers to more than just how you feel when you find out you can fit 48 inches of car seat in a 46 inch back seat. Essentially, sometimes certain combinations of car seats will fit together like pieces of a puzzle, overlapping here and underlapping there. This is an advanced fitting skill, and it's strongly recommended that you have your final installation checked by a qualified Child Passenger Safety Technician. Each car seat must be securely installed on its own so that taking one or more seats out of the vehicle will not leave the remaining car seats loose. Install the center car seat first, and make sure it is tight. Then install the car seat(s) on either side and get them tight. Finally, remove the center car seat and make sure the other two are still sufficiently tight. Reinstall the center car seat. For good measure, I would then take the outboard car seats out, double-check the center install, and then reinstall the outboard car seats again. Finally, threaten everyone in your family with dire consequences should they unbuckle any of the car seats unnecessarily. Also, it's important to know that a particular car seat puzzle may work well in one vehicle, and not in another. You may see some puzzling combinations in this Wiki which work well in the vehicle used for the demonstration but may not work in your car at all. Even different model years of the same car can have slight differences in the vehicle seat or the location of the door handles which will affect your puzzle. When you are trying to determine which car seats will "puzzle" well together, look at the shape of each seat. Drastically different styles of seat tend to puzzle best together. For example, a Diono Radian sits low to the vehicle seat and (when forward facing) flush against the vehicle seat back. A Graco My Ride is a huge beast of a car seat, but it sits up high on a narrow base and the sides of the seat (when forward facing) round out away from the vehicle seat back at the edges. For this reason, a Graco My Ride and a Diono Radian "puzzle" well together in many vehicles when they are both installed in the same direction (this is true whether they are both rear-facing or both forward-facing). The edges of the Radian will usually tuck nicely under the edges of the My Ride. In many vehicles which need three rear-facing seats across the back a Radian-My Ride-Radian combination is a set made in heaven. However, if you're trying to install one seat rear-facing and the one next to it forward-facing, the My Ride and the Radian are a particularly bad combination; the side of the My Ride will push against the side of the Radian and it will seem like both seats take up a ton of space. When installing three Radians in a row in a tight space, it helps to alternate their directions; whether that's rear-facing seats outboard and a forward-facing seat in the center or vice versa, they can often fit where no other car seat can in this combination. This is because the Radian is 17" wide at the shoulders but only about 14" wide in the seating area. When all three are installed the same direction, you need 51" across at the shoulders; but when the directions alternate you only need about 42"! That's right, alternating the direction buys you approximately'' 9 inches'' of extra space in your back seat!! Watch this space for more information on puzzling. And pictures! We hope to get lots of pictures up soon!